Google Photos still seems super geared towards a consumer / pure phone photo backup experience and purpose. I wish they would expand it further to accommodate heavier use / amateur needs, better mass upload and mass management, folder management etc.
It's definitely not a file folder sync design like Drive or Dropbox.
If you just want to upload pure files without all the photo AI etc, then Drive folders should work fine for your needs. It'll largely be a backup / cloud storage destination.
if Google Maps becomes too difficult or terrible to use, and there's a better competitor, users will naturally switch to the alternative.
Unless you guys can start something better, you'll just have to use Google Maps?
I don't think Apple Maps or any other service has a good enough data or feature set right now or forseeable future, outside of the California or US geographic area.
Either Google Maps raise it's developer API pricing to support all their investment into the service, and I'm sure it's not cheap to support, especially with their streetview efforts, or else ads go into the consumer side.
For a long time we enjoyed the free ride from Google Search's desktop revenue.
YouTube ain't a Gsuite service with SLA. So this is much more likely to have a public report. Whether it's detailed or not is another thing.
Also it's probably due to the underlying GAE or GCS issue is my guess.
I admit I actually rather liked Google+, for certain communities it was really active and well suited. However now that Google is decoupled and free from G+ shackles, it has really room to take off and grow in new areas, which is exciting to see. eg G+ logins will now be returned to G or Gmail branding, probably dramatically increases consumer confidence and mindshare, and other stuff. Developer teams can be fully redeployed to other products etc. Building of "micro" communities within Maps, YouTube, etc will accelerate, and that's really where it should be, rather than forced to accede to G+ product area.